How the Shutdown Hurts the Poor

People have paid a great deal of attention this past week to how the government shutdown has disappointed national-park visitors, closed monuments, and made it impossible to enter the Smithsonian museums. All true. But what about the services that provide necessities to low-income people: food, education, cash?

As week two of the shutdown gets underway, users of an array of basic services, including the Head Start early-education program, Meals on Wheels, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, are being hit. While it has largely spared Social Security and Medicare, these other services rely on annual appropriations. Without a spending agreement in D.C., their workers don’t get paid. States have made up for the some of the funding shortfall, but as the shutdown drags on that approach becomes less sustainable.

In parts of the country, programs have already stopped providing services. The National Head Start Association has estimated that an additional nineteen thousand children aren’t in preschool now. Last week, low-income families in central and northern Florida found out that their children’s Head Start programs had closed. Nationally, nearly two dozen major Head Start programs due to get their grants on October 1st have been affected. (The timing of the funding is staggered, so for each month that goes by without a resolution to the standoff, more state programs will run out of money.)

The federal government has also stopped sending funds to states for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which provides cash benefits to more than four million people. No states had ceased making TANF payments as of Sunday, but Michigan announced early in the shutdown that it could run out of funds within a couple weeks if the shutdown continues.

In Connecticut and other states, officials have warned that funds for their low-income energy-assistance programs, which help the poor heat their homes, could run dry in November if the shutdown continues, forcing them to either suspend the programs or somehow find cash from other sources. Low- to moderate-income applicants for mortgages tend to have their loans underwritten by the Federal Housing Administration—which, during the shutdown, hasn’t been underwriting new loans. The distribution of U.S.D.A. rural-housing loans has also stalled. And the processing of applications for disability benefits, a program of particular importance to people with low incomes, has been delayed because staff members aren’t on hand to go through newly filed paperwork.

WIC usually gets a roughly seven-billion-dollar appropriation but, without a congressional agreement, spending is now down to a contingency fund of only a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. This is a program that can’t wait, or shouldn’t; part of its logic is that early intervention is crucial. It helps new mothers feed themselves and their babies properly and gives them advice for breastfeeding and health care. It especially helps babies who are at risk, whose lives might be shaped by health problems early on. In Utah, low-income mothers enrolled in WIC have been getting their vouchers for milk and other staples. But low-income women trying to enroll in the program—perhaps because of a new baby—are out of luck: the state stopped admitting new clients the day the shutdown began. In Arkansas, WIC was still accepting new clients, but its administrators said the fund was almost out of cash.

Other states have been keeping their programs afloat by essentially lending them state dollars. “States may make the decision to continue operations for some period, but they will be doing so at their own risk with the understanding that Federal funds may not be forthcoming,” reads a message on the U.S.D.A. web site. The longer a federal impasse on spending lasts, the more likely it is that states will have to further cut these programs.

Other impacts on the poor are less obvious. With ninety per cent of OSHA employees furloughed, workplace-safety inspections aren’t taking place. Ninety per cent of E.P.A. workers are also staying home, which means inspections of toxic-waste sites have stopped. The C.D.C. has stopped monitoring the spread of the flu.

The poor bear the brunt of this. After all, it tends to be low-wage, dangerous work that is most in need of the protections afforded by OSHA. Similarly, toxic-waste sites tend to be situated closer to poor communities than to rich ones. As for disease, wealthier people are likelier to get vaccines and other preventive care. Poorer people, unknowingly close to an outbreak, are likelier to end up sick if the C.D.C. doesn’t step in to explain where these outbreaks are occurring.

Kids enrolled in free and reduced-price school breakfasts and lunches haven’t seen their meals disappear. But some programs have indicated that if a shutdown were to last through the month of October they would have to start thinking about closing down their operations.

In Michigan, a Meals on Wheels program that delivers food to the elderly poor has reported that it could burn through its reserves within a couple weeks. Georgia’s Meals on Wheels program has calculated that it has only enough federal money on hand for fifteen days of food.

We don’t know how long the shutdown will last, and that uncertainty, too, is harder on the poor. The stress of not knowing what tomorrow will bring can be debilitating. If you’re on food stamps, the fact that the Department of Agriculture believes that it can fund the program through the end of October is better than nothing—but the prospect of not being able to pay for food in November is anxiety-provoking in a way that puts even more pressure on families that already have their fair share of it.

When I was reporting my book “The American Way of Poverty,” several people talked to me about the impact that the stress associated with poverty had on them: on their ability to focus, on their mood, on their blood pressure, on their energy level. In late 2011, an ex-accountant who had lost her job at the start of the recession and spiraled downward spoke of losing weight due to her worries. A man who had lost the business he had owned talked of how his plight made him feel “worthless.” A hungry teen-ager in a suburb east of Los Angeles told me that he cried daily.

While many federal agencies put up information about the shutdown’s expected impact before it began, Web sites since then haven’t been updated and phone information services haven’t been staffed. In other words, because of the shutdown, one can’t find out about the full impact of the shutdown. It’s a bizarre way to run a country in the twenty-first century.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist, a senior fellow at the Demos think tank, and the author of “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives,” available from Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.